"My name's Cole-Hamilton. Alex Cole-Hamilton"

It's not just Ed Davey who was approached by MI6. Alex Cole-Hamilton reveals in a notably friendly interview in the Scottish Sun that he was too:

Alex Cole-Hamilton could have been driving a James Bond-style Aston Martin instead of a second-hand electric Mustang – if he had chosen to join MI6.

The leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats has revealed for the first time how he was tapped-up by the secret intelligent service when he graduated from uni.

But Alex turned his back on life as a spy for the British Government due to his Quaker religion – who believe in non violence – when he was told the information he gathered could potentially lead to the loss of lives.

We've all watched enough Tinker Tailor and Slow Horses to know that life in the intelligence services is nothing like that, but what is it about Liberal Democrats that attracts the spooks? Or is it that spies are attracted to the Liberal Democrats?

I wrote in one of my Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy columns:

When Paddy Ashdown first surfaced in the old Liberal Party, it did not take the press long to notice his intriguing background. A former special forces officer who joined the diplomatic service and was appointed first secretary to the United Kingdom mission to the United Nations in Geneva? How obvious can it be? It was from Geneva that our agents behind the Iron Curtain were run.

There were those in the party who worried that Ashdown had been planted on us by the deep state, but as he was so much more appealing than anyone we had come up with ourselves, most were happy to welcome him. Besides, given our sometimes fractious relations with our partners in the SDP/Liberal Alliance, it was comforting to know we had someone who could strangle Dr David Owen with his bare hands if it came to that.

 And I still consider Paddy and Jo Grimond as the two best Liberal leaders of my lifetime.

Morgan McSweeney's kitchen cabinet met at Roger Liddle's home

A ghost from the SDP is haunting the Guardian Politics Live this evening.

The blog quotes Rachael Maskell, the Labour MP for York Central, as welcoming Morgan McSweeney’s resignation but saying more needs to be done to tackle factionalism within the party:

"It is a start, but we need to know how decisions have been made in the Labour party, including the role of Peter Mandelson and Morgan McSweeney’s ‘kitchen cabinet’, and how this whole culture will turn away from the factionalism to an inclusive culture which seeks to listen and engage MPs and prevent future errors over policy."

And the then it provides some context for her remarks:

It has been reported that McSweeney convened a "kitchen cabinet" of like-minded Labour figures who met on Sunday evenings at the London home of Roger Liddle, a Labour peer and old friend of Mandelson.

Liddle was made a peer in 2010 and took the Labour whip. You wouldn't know it from his Wikipedia entry but he was once a leading light of the SDP. 

He was an SDP member throughout its existence (1981-88) and served on its national committee. He was then a Liberal Democrats until the mi-1990s,

Liddle was a parliamentary candidate for his old parties, fighting Vauxhall in 1983, the Fulham by-election in 1986, and Hertfordshire North in 1992. 

He had been a special adviser to Bill Rodgers when he was a Labour minister before the 1979 general election and left Labour with him.

But later, with the rise of New Labour, Liddle became a close associate of Peter Mandelson and rejoined the party. In the days when I was on the Lib Dem federal policy committee and had a Commons press pass, he seemed to be at every political event I attended.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: At a signal box outside Sherburn in Elmet

Lord Bonkers made much the same observation about a choirboy singing Lloyd George Knew My Father in the first Christmas diary I helped him with. As the was published in Liberator 35 years ago, I reasoned that I could repeat it without boring his audience. 

And while I'm talking to people who weren't born when I began writing this nonsense, yes, in 1981 the SDP really did hold a rolling conference that took the train through Perth, Bradford and London.

Christmas Eve

I do not regard Christmas as having properly begun until I hear the piping voice of a choirboy tackle the opening verse of “Lloyd George Knew My Father”. As usual, the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols at St Asquith’s is a triumph, and my enjoyment of it is only enhanced by the presence in the pew behind me of Cook’s rich contralto. I hear her urge choirs of angels to “sing in exculpation”, learn that “the holly bears a pickle” and harmonise with her when the organist strikes up “In the Beith Midwinter”. 

As to the lessons, Wera Duckworth reads from the work of that great Liberal L.T. Duckworth; William and Jim Wallace read Graham Wallas; and I tell the joke about Roy Jenkins and the lavatory brush that once had me set down from the SDP’s rolling conference train at a signal box outside Sherburn in Elmet.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.

Earlier this week...

• The Duke of Buccleuch is pretty chuffed too
• I hurry to book the rather singed Kwarteng for next year

"Fight for the soul of our country": Josh Barbarinde profiled in the New Statesman

During his successful campaign for the Liberal Democrat presidency, Josh Barbarinde's supporters emphasised his unparalleled ability to gain media coverage. They always sounded a little optimistic in a world where not even the party leader gets as much attention as he deserves, but Josh is indeed the subject of a substantial article by Rachel Cunliffe on the New Statesman website.

Much of the piece is about Josh personally, but then his compelling backstory is part of what attracts the media. And it does eventually get on to Lib Dem strategy:

As the Lib Dems gear up for 2026, this is how they are framing the conversation. Brexit is back on the agenda, with a renewed debate about the customs union as a way to spur economic growth and tackle the cost of living crisis. Electoral reform is high up on the list too, as the electorate fractures across too many parties for first-past-the-post to be able to cope with. Both are subjects on which the Lib Dems have campaigned vigorously, and even won parliamentary votes with the help of Labour rebels.

But if neither of those subjects can be relied upon to capture the public’s imagination, there is another option: presenting the party as the alternative to the narrative of division and nationalism seized upon by Reform. As flags pop up on roundabouts across the country like mushrooms sprouting over a lawn, the visible manifestation of a deeper decay, the Lib Dems, with their 72 MPs and message of “hopeful nostalgia”, want to be the antidote.

Asked what his personal role in this is, Josh replies:

"To gee-up our party to fight for the soul of our country."

The change isn't on the Lib Dem website yet, but the party constitution was amended at last autumn's conference to say that the president "shall be the voice of party members". This suggests that Josh, like every party president before him, will interpret the role in his own idiosyncratic way.

Perhaps the Lib Dem presidency is still a victim of its history. When it became clear the first leader of the Liberal Democrats would be a former Liberal (Alan Beith or Paddy Ashdown), the important-sounding but ill-defined role of president was created so it could be occupied by a leading former SDP member.

The LRB podcast takes us deeper into Paul Marshall

Peter Geoghegan talks about the mysterious Paul Marshall, who began working for Charles Kennedy in his SDP backbencher days and is now a right-wing media mogul, on the latest London Review of Books podcast.

This follows the LRB article on Marshall that I blogged about the other day.

Here Geoghegan discusses why it is that Marshall is prepared to lose so much money funding media organisations from the cerebral Unherd to the nakedly populist GB News.

He is also impressively well informed about old debates within the Liberal Democrats. Could it be that he's been exploring the archive of back numbers on the Liberator website.

Paul Marshall: From SDP researcher to right-wing media mogul

The new London Review of Books has a substantial article by Peter Geoghegan on SDP researcher turned right-wing media mogul Paul Marshall.

It takes us through his career, from researcher to Charles Kennedy in Kennedy's days as an SDP Alliance MP, via his own candidacy in the 1987 general election to his take over of the party's ailing think-tank Centre for Reform. He relaunched this as CentreForum, with a far more right-wing agenda.

Then it's on to The Orange Book, which Geoghegan, unlike many of its critics and adherents, appears to have read:

Many Lib Dems still remember Marshall primarily for The Orange Book, the controversial collection he edited in 2004 with David Laws, then a rising star on the Lib Dem right. The Orange Book is less incendiary than its reputation might suggest. 

Although the book was billed as a response to ‘nanny-state liberalism’, most of the essays are standard social democratic fare: Vince Cable making the case for financial reforms, bromides from Nick Clegg about the need for transparency in the European Union. 

Other chapters, however, suggest an effort to move the party to the right. [David] Laws proposed replacing the NHS with a French-style social insurance system. Another MP, Mark Oaten, contributed an essay about cutting crime titled ‘Tough Liberalism’. (He later admitted that it had been written by a researcher.) 

It was David Laws' chapter, which he reportedly included without informing the other authors, that led to a row at the Liberal Democrat conference and to the whole publication being seen as an attack on Charles Kennedy's leadership.

As to an attack on nanny-state liberalism, The Orange Book contained the purest expression of that creed I've ever read. It was largely a cuttings job (and cuttings from the Daily Mail, if I recall rightly) by the normally sound Steve Webb and a researcher.

Those cuttings were full of horror stories about the effects of bad parenting. I suppose the idea was that if the lower orders could be persuaded to raise their children properly, then there would be less need for public spending and it would be possible to cut taxes for the middle classes.

It was all a long time ago, but you can read my Liberator review of The Orange Book on this blog.

Then it's on to Brexit. Geoghegan says of Marshall:

In the aftermath of the referendum he attacked the Bank of England for being anti-Brexit, donated £500,000 to the Tories under Boris Johnson and funded the Alternative Arrangements Commission on the Irish border question. The AAC looked like an official government body but was in fact run by a private think tank. It was dominated by right-wing Tory MPs such as Steve Baker and Suella Braverman who opposed the 'backstop' that would have kept Northern Ireland in the single market.

Money well spent? It doesn't sound like it

After he was done with Brexit, Marshall founded the Unherd website. It's tone is the sort of world-weary Toryism you once found in the Spectator and for which I have a weakness myself. And it's a clever name, though many of its contributors have long been heard elsewhere and few of their opinions lack a herd that already follows them.

None of this tone was to be found in his next media venture GB News.

Geoghegan dwells on Marshall's financial career, his membership of the influential and fashionable congregation of Holy Trinity Brompton and, in education, his funding of his own multi-academy trust.

But I am left wondering, for all his money, how much political nous Marshall has if he thought the SDP and then the Liberal Democrats could be wrenched away from their instinctive support for pan-European institutions.

What did political parties do on polling day before 1945?

I once heard a story about polling day in the Brecon and Radnor by-election of 1985, which saw a gain for the Liberal Alliance candidate Richard Livsey.

A hirsute Young Liberal was telling on the day at a remote rural polling station when an old farmer arrived and challenged him.

"What are you doing? I always take the numbers for the Liberals."

It turned out that he had for years been coming here on polling day for an hour or two, taking voters' numbers and then going home with them.

This was a folk memory of political organisation. All that remained of it was the notion that taking voters' polling-card numbers somehow helped the Liberals.

After a while I began to doubt this story, however much I wanted it to be true. Because the Wikipedia article on Get out the vote says:

The traditional GOTV method used in the UK is the Reading system, developed by the Reading Constituency Labour Party and its MP Ian Mikardo for the 1945 general election. Once canvassing was performed to identify likely Labour voters, these were compiled onto 'Reading pads' or 'Mikardo sheets' featuring the names and addresses of supporters and pasted onto a large table or plank of wood. On election day these lists, with identical copies underneath, were torn off and given to GOTV campaigners.

That was certainly polling day as I knew it in the Liberal Party before personal computers came along. To Liberals, of course, Reading pads were 'Shuttleworths' - the SDP called them 'Cowley pads".

But did party workers sit round and do nothing on polling day before 1945? It sounds very unlikely.

As Michael Steed and Tony Greaves are no longer with us, I asked Mark Pack what he knew about the history of polling day operations. He replied:

The pre-1939 Woodings election manuals have a section on polling day, including 'fetching up voters' with instructions on crossing out names from cards etc. to record which supporters have voted so far. Not sure when 'fetchers-up' became 'knockers-up'.

I now suspect Ian Mikardo's contribution to polling day was harnessing the power of carbon paper to come up with better stationery.

So the moral is you shouldn't believe everything your read on Wikipedia. As for myself, I shall go on believing that story about Brecon and Radnor.

Spying: Another column for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy

I've just sent off another column to the JCPCP, so it's time to post another of my earlier ones.

The idea that Noel Coward had a role in wartime intelligence has been taken seriously by recent biographers - something else to read up on. And whatever the truth of that, he had upset the Nazis enough to appear on the list of people to be executed after the invasion.

When this list was revealed after the German surrender, Rebecca West, who also appeared on it, sent Coward a telegram: "My dear, the people we should have been seen dead with."

Spychology

The only spy I have known is the one I wrote jokes for. 

Back in the 1990s, I had friends at Liberal Democrat court and could send in lines and ideas for Paddy Ashdown’s speeches. The 1997 general election campaign was, I think, the last at which BBC Radio 4 broadcast a daily late-evening round up of speeches from the hustings, and I sometimes heard my work used. At the following election, a programme satirising the election was broadcast in that slot. It was Peter Cook who said, back in the 1960s, that “Britain is in danger of sinking giggling into the sea.”

When Paddy Ashdown first surfaced in the old Liberal Party, it did not take the press long to notice his intriguing background. A former special forces officer who joined the diplomatic service and was appointed first secretary to the United Kingdom mission to the United Nations in Geneva? How obvious can it be? It was from Geneva that our agents behind the Iron Curtain were run.

There were those in the party who worried that Ashdown had been planted on us by the deep state, but as he was so much more appealing than anyone we had come up with ourselves, most were happy to welcome him. Besides, given our sometimes fractious relations with our partners in the SDP/Liberal Alliance, it was comforting to know we had someone who could strangle Dr David Owen with his bare hands if it came to that.

Ashdown’s memoirs told us inevitably little about his MI6 years, though his friend the former Labour minister Denis MacShane suggested after his death that he had been involved with Operation Gladio, which set up arms and supplies caches all over Western Europe for the Resistance to use if Soviet tanks ever rolled in.

Admirers of John le Carré were not surprised by what Ashdown did say about the organisation:

When I first joined, our headquarters was in an anonymous multi-storey tower block south of the Thames whose existence was never supposed to be made public. Indeed, we were all instructed to approach it with discretion, taking appropriate precautions.

But even George Smiley must have winced at this:

The game was, however, rather given away by the conductors of the London buses that passed our door at regular intervals: they delighted in announcing the local bus stop with a cheery (and usually very loud) shout of, "Lambeth Tube Station. All spies alight 'ere."

******

Ian Fleming’s first choice to play James Bond was Noel Coward, but The Master sent a telegram in reply to the offer: ‘DR NO? NO. NO. NO.’ Coward, it is true, had played a spy in Our Man in Havana, but that was a deskbound one with no licence to kill.

What doesn’t work on the screen, however, can work in real life. The Carry On actor Peter Butterworth, for instance, was one of the vaulters who helped in the Wooden Horse escape from a World War II German prisoner of war camp in, but when he auditioned for a part in the film he was told he ‘didn't look convincingly heroic or athletic enough’.

And so it was with Coward, though quite what he did in the war is not clear. Some sources say he was a member of a network of rich travellers who gathered information from across Europe just before hostilities broke out: others that he worked in black propaganda in the same unit as Guy Burgess and Kim Philby.

What seems more certain is that he ran the British propaganda office in Paris, telling his superiors: "If the policy of His Majesty's Government is to bore the Germans to death, I don't think we have time." He later used his showbiz fame to help persuade the American public and government that they should enter the war.

Coward and Fleming were near neighbours in Jamaica, where much of Dr No was filmed, and both members of the slightly disreputable international elite that had flocked to the newly independent island – there was nothing slightly about another of its members, Errol Flynn. A young Chris Blackwell, who came from a family in that set, helped find locations for the film and was offered a job by Harry Salzman, who produced it alongside Cubby Broccoli.

Blackwell was tempted, but decided to remain in the music business. He moved to London and imported Jamaican records to sell to the expatriate community there, then founded his own production company. He discovered first Millie Small (‘My Boy Lollipop’) and then Steve Winwood and the Spencer Davis Group, and with them on board, Island Records took off. 

In 1976 Ian Fleming’s Goldeneye estate on Jamaica came on the market, twelve years after his death. Blackwell bought it, but only after he had failed to persuade another Island artist to do so. Bob Marley could be stubborn.

******

When the BBC showed Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective at Christmas I found it had curdled since I saw it in 1986, but their adaption of John Le Carré’s spy novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy from 1979 never disappoints. I know its seven episodes so well that I had to steel myself before seeing the 2011 film of the book and then steel myself not to walk out of the cinema. It was all wrong. Really, it was just different, though two hours was not enough time to do justice to the book’s intricate plot.

If the TV series, like Fawlty Towers, gets a bit more Seventies every time you see it, that’s only to its advantage. Much of the publicity about the film concerned its efforts to recreate the look of that decade, but the television series didn’t have to try at all.

Someone working on it for the BBC asked a contact if he could be smuggled into the MI6 building - the spooks had moved since Paddy Ashdown’s day - to see what it was like. "There’s no need," he was told. "It’s exactly like Broadcasting House."

Lord Bonkers on the retirement of Lord Owen

"It was when his candidate barely succeeded in defeating Dr David Owen's hilarious "Continuing SDP Party" at the first Bootle by-election of 1990 that my old friend Lord Sutch decided to step back from the front line of politics."

Bill Brand and The Nearly Man: When ITV screened drama series about British politics

The death of the dramatist and screenwriter Trevor Griffiths has reminded me of the Seventies, when British television companies showed political dramas in primetime. 

Griffiths's contribution was Bill Brand, about which the BFI's Screenonline site is positively rhapsodic:

Bill Brand (ITV, 1976) was an epic attempt to lay bare the nature of political power in the UK, and more specifically to analyse if, and how, the socialist struggle could be furthered by the parliamentary Labour movement. Its origins can be seen in Trevor Griffiths' early Play for Today, 'All Good Men' (BBC, tx. 31/01/1974), where the tension between the social democratic and revolutionary positions were embodied in an argument between father and son.

In Bill Brand, the scope is much broader, and focuses on newly elected left-wing MP Brand (Jack Shepherd), a former Trotskyist, and his attempts to negotiate a path between the demands of his family, the local party, the whips and his conscience, while still trying to make a difference politically. During the course of the series he is vilified by the press for his controversial views, and through his acquaintance with the eventual leadership candidate David Last (Alan Badel), he is witness to the power struggles that occur at the highest level of government. ...

The PM (Arthur Lowe) has to retire because of ill-health, and after the series was written (although before transmission) the same thing happened to Harold Wilson. More importantly, Griffiths examines the political rifts within the Labour party, and, with uncanny foresight, dramatises the ideological conflicts that would eventually lead to the formation of the SDP.

Bill Brand is a breathtaking series. Transmitted during the boiling summer of 1976, at peak-time between World in Action and News at Ten, it engaged with contemporary politics in a dramatic way, but remained consistently intelligent, and far from talking down to its viewers, assumed that they were a vital part of the political processes described, and as committed to understanding how things might therefore improve. There has been nothing like it since, and that's more the pity.

I must have watched it, because I remember being impressed by Jack Shepherd, but I can't have seen that much of it, because I have no memory of Arthur Lowe as the PM.

Play the video above to see both of them in action. The good news is that the whole series appears to be on YouTube.

Bill Brand was made by Thames Television. The year before it was shown, ITV had screened another drama about the Labour Party.

The Nearly Man was made by Granada and written by Arthur Hopcraft, who was to go on to adapt John le Carré's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It's hero, played by Tony Britton, was a moderate Labour MP who had written an important book on the future of socialism some 20 years before. 

Despite this, he had never been made a minister, but there were still those who see him as cabinet material or even a possible leader.

The Spinning Image site says of the series:

Here there was no less attention to detail about what drives a politician - or more specifically, what drives a politician to aim for the top, and whether it is essential to be so ambitious to be good at your job; indeed, are you a failure as a politician if you do not do so, however successful you may or may not be? 

But the public's perception of what makes you leadership material was important as well: in the first episode Collinson's younger son dies in a road accident which generates a lot of sympathy for him across the country, and makes up his mind and that of his backers that he has it in him to stake a claim for the Cabinet, and possibly further. However, Alice turns out to be rather more sceptical, and the title of the series may provide an inkling as to his overall triumph.

Alice's lack of faith is a prime reason for the couple splitting up in episode two, whereupon Collinson meets a lecturer, Millie (Kate Fahy) at a university talk and they get along famously, to the extent that they become a couple themselves. 

Meanwhile, they try to keep this arrangement away from the ever-prying media as he makes an enemy of teacher and party activist Michael Elphick, who resents Collinson's middle class background when his constituency is working class, and he doesn't even live there, as a salt of the earth councillor, Wilfred Pickles, tries to bridge the gap between the left and right of the Labour party in a development that mirrored the increasingly fractured nature of socialist politics in Britain for years, even decades to come. All the while the big opportunity Collinson needs remains frustratingly just out of his grasp.

I imagine that Collinson held on to his seat at the 1979 election and was one of the last Labour MPs to jump ship to the SDP. After waiting some years, he was given a peerage by the Liberal Democrats, and I hope he made our front bench in the Lords before he died.

There's doesn't seem to anything of The Nearly Man on YouTube, but you can buy it on DVD. I don't remember enough of it to be able to recommend it, but again I do recall watching some of it.

The only scrap I can find online is a Facebook page that has the opening and closing titles. The Gerald Scarfe cartoons look forward to Yes Minister, but the jazz theme tune is execrable.

Shirley Williams: a Liberal lion and trailblazer?

Shirley Williams was the subject of a fringe meeting organised by the Liberal Democrat History Group at the party's spring conference this year. You can watch the proceedings in the video above

What comes over is that it was Williams's personal qualities as much as her political beliefs that attracted people to her, and that a certain diffidence held her back in her political career. I think being a woman in politics in her era is enough to explain the latter point.

I was a little surprised by the fringe meeting's title - 'Shirley Williams: Liberal Lion and Trailblazer' - because throughout her time in her first party, Williams was seen as a mainstream Labour figure. She received considerable trade union support in internal elections, for instance.

It was her intellectual opposition to Trotskyism that led her to leave Labour: she wasn't prepared to mouth  clichés about 'a broad church' or tolerate the compromises necessary to thrive under Michael Foot's leadership. That made her a lion, but not in itself a Liberal, still less a trailblazing one.

A puzzle late in her career is why she staked so much of her political capital on getting the Lib Dems to support Andrew Lansley's changes to the National Health Service. They were not in the Coalition agreement, went against everything David Cameron had said about health before the 2010 election and few people even in the Conservative Party had any idea what Lansley was trying to achieve.

When I started editing Lord Bonkers' diaries the old boy said of Shirley Williams: "Surely she must be the most popular politician ever to be defeated at three consecutive general elections?"

But I would never be that brutal, because I remember just how difficult it was to get elected as a Liberal or SDP parliamentary candidate in the Alliance years.

Thames Water and the Liberal history of the Ham Lands

Over to the Save Ham Lands and River site:

Thames Water has outlined a scheme that would involve digging a tunnel to convey treated sewage from Mogden Sewage Works, via Twickenham, in a line that will lie under Ham Lands to the discharge location on the Surrey side of the River in the North Kingston/Ham part of Ham Lands and associated local nature conservation area.

Up to six construction sites each requiring an area of size of half a football pitch will be required for tunnel shafts. A total area of 3 to 4 acres.

And here is Sarah Olney, the Liberal Democrat MP for Richmond and North Kingston, taking up the cause in Westminster Hall this week:

I congratulate my hon. Friend and constituency neighbour for securing this extremely important debate. She mentioned Ham Lands, which is in my constituency of Richmond Park. 

It is a local nature reserve that the local community has spent decades trying to protect. It has a unique ecology; it is home to many rare plants, lichen and fungi. 

Yet incredibly Thames Water proposes to build up to six major construction sites on Ham Lands, each one half the size of a football pitch. The plans include the permanent - I emphasise permanent - destruction of five acres of vital wildlife habitat. In total, 24,000 people have signed a petition against the scheme. 

Does she agree that the community has made its views very clear and that the Government must now listen?

And Munira Wilson, who had called the debate on water resources proposals for Teddington, did agree.

Ham Lands is a nature reserve in Richmond upon Thames, between the river and the villages of Ham and Petersham.

Early in the 20th century there were gravel pits there. These were worked out by the time of the second world war and they were later used as a dump for rubble from London's bombsites.

This is a reminder that what are dismissed as brownfield sites can often be more valuable for conservation and recreation than your average piece of farmland. The rubble that came to the Ham Lands, for instance, brought with it soils and seeds from across London, leading to a particularly rich local flora.

I know a bit about the Ham Lands because I lived in Richmond for a while in the early 1980s, by which time they had become a political issue in the borough.

At some point the council had bought land there with the intention of using it for housing. Later, as the Ham Lands came to be valued as a local amenity, parts were sold off to private developers.

By 1983 there was a vocal campaign to protect the Ham Lands from further development. This was achieved when the Liberal-SDP Alliance took control of the council in the autumn of 1983.

I remember Alan Watson, the Liberal PPC for Richmond and a man not without a sense of his own importance, arriving at a meeting of the constituency party to find the new council leader, David Williams, passing round photographs of Ham Lands wildlife so we could all see what had been saved.

Watson had to wait until we'd all finished admiring them before he could tell us how he was going to be in the Alliance cabinet after the next general election.

Farewell to Shirley Williams

Embed from Getty Images

I was very sorry to hear of Shirley Williams' death. Her warm, sensible, conversational style reminds us of what has been lost from British politics in recent years.

Her Guardian obituary speculates that she might have made a more attractive leader of the nascent SDP than Roy Jenkins, which makes a lot of sense.

Yet I cannot remember this possibility being talked about at the time. Put it down to sexism.

It also worth pointing out that Shirley Williams was not an insipid moderate. 

In her Labour days she was seen as being in the mainstream of the party and received a lot of trade union support in its internal elections.

Her decision to leave was down to her strong opposition to Trotskyism and belief that it had no place in the Labour Party.

Again, the existence of a politician with principles and deeply held beliefs reminds us of what we have lost.

Download the new Liberator now

The new Liberator can be downloaded free, gratis and for nothing from the magazine's website.

While you are there you can sign up for its email newsletter so you will know as soon as a new issue is posted.

Issue 406 includes tributes to Tony Greaves and articles on the Conservatives' importation of American voter-suppression tactics, British arms exports to Saudi Arabia and the 40th anniversary of the SDP's founding.

The magazine always carries a wide range of articles, but I usually turn first to Radical Bulletin, which has news and gossip about the Liberal Democrats you will find nowhere else. 

This time you can read about:

• a presentation made to various party committees by the Lib Dem director of strategy
• disgruntlement among MPs with the party's media operation
• what Tony Greaves said about Lembit Opik

In case that all sounds too good be true, there is also Lord Bonkers' Diary.

Lord Bonkers 30 years ago: Welcome to Blackpool

It's time again to see what Lord Bonkers was saying 30 years ago. The November 1990 issue of Liberator (no. 192) found him looking back on that autumn's Liberal Democrat conference.

Perhaps the old boy and I were still smarting from the Liberal Party's decision to merge with the SDP at a special conference in Blackpool two years before - we both voted against. You can find more evidence of my animus against the town in the Wikipedia entry for the Norbreck Castle Hotel.

Saturday

There are some phrases that strike terror into one's very soul. Worst of them all - worse even than "See me in my study after Prayers, Bonkers" or "The next commentator will be Christopher Martin-Jenkins - is "Welcome to Blackpool".

My low opinion of this dismal caravanserai is more than confirmed when I discover a seagull expiring on the balcony of my hotel room - the air of the town (largely an admixture of plutonium dust and sewage) having proved too much for it.

I grasp the first heavy object that comes to hand and put the unfortunate creature out of its misery with a single blow. I am left feeling sorry for the bird but pleased to have at last found a use for a Gideons' Bible.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

GUEST POST A lifetime among the Liberals

Paddy Briggs looks back over a lifetime's political involvement and forwards to the next election.

I was 13 and for the first time I started to take an interest in politics. It was JFK wot did it. That summer of 1960 a man born in the same century as me was campaigning to be President of the United States. He was beautiful as was his wife. He wasn't Harold Macmillan or Ike or de Gaulle. He had charisma (though I don't think I knew that word at the time). He won!

 

In 1962 I got a bit excited again. Now Eric Lubbock wasn’t JFK but he made me momentarily famous at my boarding school. You see I lived in Orpington which hitherto had only been famous for its chickens. I decided to be a Liberal when he won. Of course I did.

 

As a student in the late 1960s there were plenty of good causes for liberals to care about. The old men defended the deadly nonsense of Vietnam. I didn't. They defended even the racial obscenity of Apartheid. I didn't. 

 

Surely the Liberal day had dawned ? But what did that mean ? Well it wasn’t Socialist (Good). Or Conservative (even better). So I knew what it wasn't – but what actually was it? That was more difficult.

 

The real dawn of the liberalism I believed in wasn't to come until the 1980s. Like Charles Kennedy and a few other good men and true I joined the SDP. Social Democracy and Liberalism. Perfect match. The SDP did well actually but the electoral system killed us. Charlie survived and a few others. I was mortified.

 

The Liberal Democrats were a decent post-SDP refuge and they did pretty well. Mainly as a home for those of the Centre/Left who lived in constituencies where Labour was nowhere and the Tories weren't that popular. Including mine – Twickenham. Vince was an old colleague of mine in Shell and a kindred spirit. Easy call. 

 

I liked the Coalition and thought the love-in in the Rose Garden was fine. My wife told me it was a public schoolboy alliance. She was certainly right but it suited me. But Nick didn't use his power as wisely as he could have. 2015 was a disaster. Even Vince lost. 2016 was the beginning of the end. The hideous referendum. Trump. Liberalism and pro Europeanism (my watchwords) became dirty words. 

 

So what now? Well first and foremost there’s Keir Starmer. He must be a man that the Libs can do business with. Surely to goodness. The policy is staring us in the face. Labour and the Lib Dems have much in common. An electoral alliance please. Labour to stand down in Lib Dem constituencies and in Tory constituencies where the LD’s are running second. The Lib Dems to do the same. Don't stand in Tory Conservative/Labour marginals.

You can follow Paddy Briggs on Twitter.

Henry Hardy, David Owen and Simon Callow on Bryan Magee

Bryan Magee – philosopher, writer, broadcaster, politician – died on 26 July at the age of eighty-nine. 

After his death, the three main broadsheets swiftly printed the oven-ready obituaries they had on file. But the BBC, where Magee’s reputation was cemented in the later decades of the twentieth century, failed even to mention his death, let alone look back at his life and work. What were Front Row and Last Word thinking of? Not the tiniest clip from the rich Magee broadcasting archive were we offered. 

Magee was (and still is) a household name among the chattering classes, rightly, and this was an astonishing failure of cultural memory on Auntie’s part. He was a consummate interviewer, and one of the most articulate and engaging expositors, especially of philosophy, who ever lived. The silence on the air waves at the end of his life was shameful.

Henry Hardy begins a piece for The Oldie with this complaint about the BBC's ignoring of Bryan Magee's death.

He goes on to give his own memories of him and is followed by David Owen (Magee was a Labour and then an SDP MP) and the actor Simon Callow.

I have my own reasons for being grateful to Magee.

His television series Men of Ideas, featuring interviews with many of the great philosophers of the day, was screened at the start of 1978 when I was being interviewed by universities because I hoped to study philosophy there.

And his superb short book on Karl Popper was a strong influence on my own thinking,

I respect him too as a man who knew the back streets of Market Harborough.

Why I'm concerned the Lib Dem leadership election has been postponed until next May

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Last week the Liberal Democrats' Federal Board voted to postpone the party's leadership election until May 2021.

It's not clear what constitutional basis they had for doing so, and there had been much criticism of the decision. Some see it as a way of excluding the party's members from the choice of leader, at least for a year, to ensure the establishment's favourite son retains the post for as long as possible

I worry because the idea the public will be impressed that we have stepped back from the political fray and reward us at the ballot box in due course, which some use as an argument in support of the decision, reminds me of a strand in the party's thinking I have complained about before:

You often hear the criticism that we are too tribalist, but that is a libel. 

Chuka Umunna joined the party and was made our Treasury spokesperson the same weekend, and I have not read a whisper of criticism of him or that promotion. 

Back in the 1980s the Liberal Party, which was supposed to be far more fractious than the modern-day Lib Dems, did David Steel's bidding and stood down in half the seats in the country to make room for the SDP. You can't  get much less tribal than that. 

A fairer criticism of Liberals and Liberal Democrats over the years would be that we have been too prone to the belief that the route to success lies in giving in. 

If only we give up enough of our beliefs and policies, runs the logic, if only we stand down in favour of someone else in enough seats, we will be swept to power. 

You sometimes get the idea we believe we are an obstacle to Liberal government and not its greatest hope.

These days a wholly online campaign would exclude few members, but it would be wrong to hold the election right away.

But let's hold it as soon as is decent and practicable. Otherwise, by the time the we get a new leader the public may have forgotten all about us.

A warning to Labour from 1983

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What if the opinion polls are right? Yes, Corbyn did much better in 2017 than anyone expected, but what if Labour finds itself struggling to beat the Liberal Democrats into third place at the next election, much as Michael Foot struggled to outpoll the Liberal/SDP  Alliance in 1983?

You might think that would mark the end of Corbynism and a long march back to the centre ground n Labour's behalf.

Don't bank on it.

Here is Tony Benn's reaction to Labout's catastrophic (the Tories had a 144-seat majority) defeat in 1983:

"The general election of 1983 has produced one important result that has passed virtually without comment in the media,” said Benn. “It is that, for the first time since 1945, a political party with an openly socialist policy has received the support of over eight and a half million people. 

"This is a remarkable development by any standards and it deserves some analysis … the 1983 Labour manifesto commanded the loyalty of millions of voters and a democratic socialist bridge-head in public understanding and support can be made."

This determination of the hard left to learn nothing from defeat was a gift to Neil Kinnock, His reforms of the Labour Party met with little opposition because the only alternative appeared to be perpetual defeat,

But Kinnock commanded a majority on the party's national executive. Whoever succeeds Corbyn, the hard left will enjoy that advantage and may well take Tony Benn's line on electoral defeat.

In which case there will be no easy way back for Labour.

Bryan Magee (1930-2019)

Bryan Magee died today at the age of 89.

He sat as Labour and then SDP MP for Leyton between 1974 and 1983 - he was one of the last Labour MPs to make the jump - but it is not his politics that I remember him for.

As a television presenter he was able to make philosophy accessible to the intelligent general viewer.

The clip above shows him talking to A.J. Ayer's about the latter's once scandalous Language, Truth and Logic - Ayer is amusingly candid about the book's faults.

It forms part of a longer interview about logical positivism, and you can find links to many of Magee's programmes on philosophy on Open Culture.

Today it is fashionable to decry 'talking heads' television, but if the heads are interesting enough there is nothing more riveting.

I was going through a series university interviews looking to get a place to read philosophy while it was being broadcast, so I was immensely grateful for it.

A second reason why I am grateful to Magee is that he introduced me to the thought of Karl Popper.

Magee's short book on Popper is well worth seeking out. It presents a Popper who supports social reform, rather than the Thatcherite one later admirers detected. As the left has recently begun to find virtues in Popper again, this view of him may be coming back into fashion.

I no longer believe that Popper defeated Hume's scepticism over induction. But he did show that we don't rely on induction and provided a much better model of how human reason works.

When I wrote the entry on Popper in Duncan Brack and Ed Randall's Dictionary of Liberal Thought, I had no idea that Magee had been evacuated from Hoxton to Market Harborough during the war and  lived literally round the corner from where I lived as a teenager.

Here is a passage from his Growing up in a War:

Logan Street was near the edge of Harborough, and I thought of myself as living a long way from my school in the centre. Each journey there or back was like an odyssey. I would set out through the garden, going out of the back gate and down the lane into Highfield Street. 

In walking the length of Highfield Street I might pick up a friend or two. We would turn right into East Street; and there almost immediately in front of us on the next corner, was the shop that sold things that mattered. 

If any of us had any money we would go in and buy sweets or a comic. In the same shop there was a post office, where Auntie drew out the money to keep me, and where later I was to start spending some of my pocket money on savings stamps to help win the war. 

We would encounter schoolmates in the shop, so an enlarged gang of us would emerge, and then, perhaps, start arguing in the street over sweets or comics, or something that had happened the previous day. 

We might have a fight there and then, or two boys would go at it while the rest of us formed a ring around them and watched; or the general argy-bargy might carry us round the corner into Nelson Street. 

Here the space widened so we would forget about the fight and start a game. But we had to keep moving towards school, so our game would carry us on past the Catholic church and down towards the Coventry Road. 

There on the pavement we would encounter local children about to go to their own school, beside the church, so we would set on them and terrorise them for a bit, perhaps chasing them into school. 

Finally we would arrive at our own school, behind the Baptist church, and carry on our games and fights in the playground until the bell rang.

This is a walk I still do in the reverse direction when I go to cook for my Mum. The shop closed in the New Labour years when it ceased to be a post office, but I bought sweets there myself in the Seventies.

Magee's school 'behind the Baptist church' must have been on the site now occupied by Manor Court and the B&M discount store.

All in all, a remarkable passage to find in a book I bought because I was grateful for the author's influence on my own thinking.